MCS design proposal

[Jannis Pohlmann]

Am Sun, 8 Jul 2007 22:13:49 -0700
schrieb "Brian J. Tarricone" <bjt23 at cornell.edu>:

> On Sun, 8 Jul 2007 13:58:44 -0400 Erik Harrison wrote:
> 
> > On 7/8/07, Brian J. Tarricone <bjt23 at cornell.edu> wrote:
> > > On Sun, 8 Jul 2007 13:07:20 -0400 Erik Harrison wrote:
> 
> > > > The advantage of
> > > > MCS to me is being able to plugin something like a kiosk mode,
> > >
> > > No, the current MCS daemon has nothing to do with kiosk mode.
> > > Kiosk mode is implemented (poorly, in many cases) in each
> > > individual application.  It's totally settings-manager-unaware.
> > 
> > Allow me to restate - the value of the MCS *design* if not the
> > implementation is being able to control access to gets/sets without
> > putting in application specific code.
> 
> Well, we could potentially do it that way, but we don't.  AFAIR, all
> the Xfce modules that use kiosk mode check XfceKiosk in the
> application.  In that case they usually ignore MCS entirely and rely
> on hard-coded defaults.
> 
> > Upon further reflection though, I'm not sure that Jannis's outline
> > really gives us enough for even that, because to do this properly,
> > one would need to be able to query MCS for what it's allowed to set
> > and what it isn't, which potentially complicates the API
> > considerably.
> 
> Not necessarily.  A simple org.xfce.MCS.SettingIsWritable() method
> seems pretty straightforward.  The daemon should be smart enough to
> return the proper locked-down values based on the uid of the process
> connecting to it.

Yep, I also think that a method like this would suffice.

> On a side note, can we *please* not call the new system MCS?  Just
> make up a new name.  It's confusing as-is.

I'm not good at finding names for programs and libraries, but I agree
with you. We could as well renaming "channels" to "domains" or
"packages" (though this might be a little too Java) or something else.
Suggestions, please!

  - Jannis
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